Why Do More Women Than Men Still Believe in God?

Photograph of woman praying in church by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

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Last week, a new study confirmed something essential about women, something that refuses to budge, even though many say it’s long past time. Professors at Trinity College in Connecticut analyzed the numbers of Americans unaffiliated to any religion. While the number of male nonbelievers was rocketing, the overall totals were slowed by women hitching themselves to the anchor of faith: “Gender difference is a brake on the growth of the No Religion population,” says the study, which found that 19 percent of men were no longer denizens of a religious America, while only 12 percent of women live outside the faithful fold. In the past, one could say that women tended the hearth, and men participated in the marketplace. But today?

These statistics are consistent with a recent Pew Forum summary of religion in America. In fact, a researcher at Pew told me that studies going back as far as he can remember have shown this discrepancy, and reaching back into history, even prehistory, we find the same story. And yet, major religions—put down your crystals and pocket those pentagrams, ladies—have always favored men. Not a single major faith is led by members of its female flock, and the more deeply adherent a religious group becomes, the less freedom it offers its women, not to mention power. It's hard not to compare women sticking with faith to wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the institution that they'll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to maintain their own status quo.

Researchers have offered many theories about why women are religious in greater numbers than men. Most are inconclusive; all are fascinating. Some investigators locate the engine of belief in our very brain chemistry, and find the female brain far more apt to sense the divine. Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Michael Persinger, the reigning cleric of the neurology of belief, has asserted that the “experience” of God, or feeling the presence of the divine, is literally built into the brain, specifically in the limbic system or the temporal lobe. When Persinger applied magnetic fields over the temporal lobe to mimic the reaction he found in electromagnetic studies, the gender difference was “quite impressive”—that women sensed the presence of a “sentient being” in greater numbers than men.

“Belief,” Persinger told me, “relates more to how the person relates, interprets, and reconstructs the experience.” In other words, even when men and women had the same response in the brain, women were more apt to attribute it to something divine, “out of body.” Other scientists have found these limbic tendencies particularly pronounced in adolescent girls, concurrent with the final stages of brain development. As Barry Kosmin, a coauthor of the new Trinity College study says, “That's why when anybody sees the Virgin Mary, it's a couple of young girls on a mountainside in Southern Europe.” (Nota bene: This week, Sam Harris—who gained fame by authoring The End of Faith but is by training a neuroscientist—released his new findings on the neural correlates of belief. He told me in this case he found no difference between the workings of the female and male brain.)

Some researchers hypothesize that women are hardwired to believe because of evolutionary imperatives. Belief in God—or the Mount Olympus ensemble cast, or a phalanx of wood spirits, and so on—has long been connected with tribal ritual, and formed the center of communities. Women relied on these communities for the survival of their children, while men were off spearing buffalo, pillaging neighboring settlements—or whatever the caveman business trip furnished. The relationship between belonging and belief is an ancient one. It may have resulted in the development of certain alleles connected to a sense of God, or at least a commitment to religion.